Morse on Before and After Hinckley: Legal Insanity in the United States @pennlaw

Stephen Morse, University of Pennsylvania Law School, is publishing Before and After Hinckley: Legal Insanity in the United States in The Insanity Defense: International and Comparative Perspectives (Ronnie Mackay & Warren Brookbanks, eds., Oxford, 2022). Here is the abstract.

This chapter first considers the direction of the affirmative defense of legal insanity in the United States before John Hinckley was acquitted by reason of insanity in 1982 for attempting to assassinate President Reagan and others and the immediate aftermath of that acquittal. Since the middle of the 20th Century, the tale is one of the rise and fall of the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code test for legal insanity. Then it turns to the constitutional decisions of the United States Supreme Court concerning the status of legal insanity. Finally, it addresses the substantive and procedural changes that have occurred in the insanity defense since the wave of legal changes following the Hinckley decision.

Download the chapter from SSRN at the link.

Shakespeare As Therapist?

Herschel Prins, Loughborough University & University of Birmingham, has published Mental Disorder, Criminality and the Literary Imagination at 53 Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 290 (2014).

This contribution attempts to explore the use of a variety of literary sources as aids or ‘prompts’ to understanding those offenders and offender‐patients whose mental states often raise considerable anxieties in those charged with their management. The word ‘prompt’ is borrowed from the work of my friend, the late doctor Murray Cox, and his co‐worker Alice Theilgaard in their seminal work Shakespeare as Prompter (1994). The author of the present article hopes that its content will enable readers to focus more clearly on why we sometimes fail our offenders and offender‐patients; in particular, through the mechanism of denial. The use of dramatic presentation when proffered with a unique blend of force and sensitivity can permit us to view puzzlement and horror from a safe distance and, at the same time, encourage us to increase our empathic understanding and professional practice. Most of the examples cited are brief allusions but, because her history is so compellingly applicable to our concerns in the present contribution, the ‘case’ of Lady Macbeth is considered in more detail. Finally, I would note some very wise words by Cox and Theilgaard (1994) in a caveat note to the reader: ‘Should the focus on therapy ever become occluded by preoccupation with poetic association, clinical skills would be diminished, distraction ensue and therapeutic contact deteriorate’ (not numbered). In the material that follows readers should bear such a cautionary note in mind.

The full text is not available from SSRN.